Accent on Accomplishment

When, in his speech last Friday, President Pusey listed some of the University's contributions to the nation's welfare and defense, he was showing more than the desire to beat the Harvard drum. He exhibited a frank recognition that the storm over Harvard "softness" toward Communism is in part a problem in public relations, and that one way to weather it is to try to more accurately portray the University to the public.

A gap between a intellectual community and Main Street will always exist because people think a university concerns itself with ideas and inquiry instead of day-to-day practicalities. In Harvard's case, this gap has widened into antagonism. This can best be seen spread over the Letters to Editors column in daily papers and in the statements of many elected representatives of the people in the State and National legislatures. If the gap widens in the next few years as it has in the last, it may result in withholding of governmental contracts and use of the University's state charter for coercive legislation.

Whatever portion of the blame for this you assign to the public, a good share must go to those professors and students who completely discount public opinion as irrational blabbering of a "great beast." And part must also go to university officials who carried traditional Harvard indifference to the point of refusal to dignify charges with convincing replies. Freedom of inquiry and publication may have made inevitable the University's acquisition of a Red label in the thirties--a label fixed even firmer in the last three years by those who hunt throughout history to make headlines. But the University has been unaware of the sensitivity of the public on this issue, and too inclined to deplore it rather than combat it.

The University's public relations problem, then, is how to change a public attitude without sacrificing the principles to tenure or limiting its free inquiry. Perhaps this can never be completely accomplished, but President Pusey has suggested a partial solution: not to deny that there were "Reds" here who were influential and destructive, but to place this fact in its proper perspective. Pusey weighed the activities of "one or two misguided, even treacherous individuals" with "the achievements of all the rest . . . founders of industries, directors of banks, research men . . . legislators, doctors . . .men of almost unquestioned loyalty, leaders in the war effort, in all the productive activities of the country, in the cultural life of the nation, in city after city." Later, he showed how the same warped perspective was undervaluing the amazing contributions of Faculty members.

Publicizing these facts would certainly be the first step in telling people what is actually going on at the University. But a detailed record of research results and famous alumni names, printed by the University in the kind of brochure that many Harvard departments use to list their accomplishments, will hardly solve the full public relations problem. President Pusey's statement points to a partial palliative, but it is like giving a man with a broken arm a temporary anesthetic. No matter how much the public learns about Harvard's accomplishments, it will still point to those who use the Fifth Amendment as rotten apples that can ruin the whose University barrel.

It will be difficult to combat these arguments, irrational as they are. In the public eye, stimulated by McCarthy's pyrotechnics, anyone who uses the Fifth Amendment is a full-fledged spy. Better public relations than any one University might accomplish would be needed to crase this view. Only be actually firing all Fifth Amendment professors, and making public massacres for the press would the University completely succeed, but no opinion, no matter how potentially harmful to our interests, justifies setting aside the principles of tenure. Therefore, while an enlarged public relations program will not solve all the problems created by recent attacks on Harvard, this is the best counter--attack the University can take at this time. Only when those responsible for our government--including the kind of men Pusey named--take it upon themselves to actively combat the state of fear which makes free inquiry and careful judgment of individuals a crime, will there no longer be a need for Harvard University to justify itself to the American people.